On today’s show, we hear from journalist Nyki Duda who draws a line from anti-immigrant movements of the 1920s to the present. Her recent articles include “My Family Was Almost ‘Repatriated’ to Mexico in the 1930s. I See It Happening Again” and an account of how Chicago fights for its sanctuary city status. 

Duda’s family migrated from Mexico to the Rust Belt where they found work in steel mills. She describes how they and other Mexican and Mexican Americans were targets of racism and xenophobia and were nearly deported after a 1919 steel strike. She tells host Allen Ruff that the phrase “repatriation movement” makes it seem like the relocation of immigrants was voluntary, when in fact it was and is not. Duda shares the parallels she sees between the “repatriation movement” and the present, including the option for “self-deportation” that is now a feature of the new CBPOne app. She calls this a symptom of the US’s plans to make its borders less permeable to the very migrant labor that the economy relies on.

Duda describes the church-based sanctuary movement of the 1980s that grew out of a tradition of liberation theology from Latin America. More recently sanctuary cities are being targeted by the Trump administration. When ICE showed up at Chicago schools, teachers started organizing to protect their students and to educate families about their rights. The Chicago Teachers’ Union has developed a bargaining for common good strategy that includes advocating for fair wages and for protecting their students against ICE. For Duda, this is just another example of how migrant communities and labor organizing are intrinsically connected. 

Nyki Duda is an editor at Al Jazeera digital and researcher at Lead Stories. As a freelance journalist, she covers migration, social movements and far-right politics. Her writing has appeared in Truthout, Jacobin, In These Times and more.

Featured image of strike leader addressing a crowd of steel workers in Gary, Indiana in 1919 via the Library of Congress.

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